About My Family, by Dawn Rebecca Craske Halstead
Please sign in to see more. My wonderful parents have just celebrated their 60th Wedding Anniversary in October 2022 - for this first time in over ten years it meant I was together with my parents, sister, brother & two nieces - a lovely time for all of us.
Someone asked me, when do you stop - I told then you don't!!! Some people just go back up their paternal line but I've been doing my reasearch for over 30 years and I just love to see all the people I'm related to. Also, my maternal line is just as important as the paternal one, after all, they all contributed to the person I am.
On 21 May 2008 I changed my name by deed poll, from Dawn Halstead to Dawn Rebecca Craske Halstead. My cousin Robbie said, after finding out, that when we are researching our families we develop a closeness with some. Rebecca is after my great- grandma Rebecca Brown Smith and Craske is because for me its different and rather strange - I used to think it was German as a child but it is actually from Norfolk - so I thought different and strange rather fitting!
I've been researching my family tree for well over thirty years now. It all started when I found the Halstead family bible at home and found out that my dad had two Uncles who had died in the First World War. Since then it has snowballed. I've spent camping holidays in Adderbury, Oxfordshire and Norfolk looking into my ancestors, when I started there was not all this information available at the click of a button. Oh the hours I spent in libraries looking at old records, but do you know something, I think that is far more rewarding that finding something 'on line'. You are looking at a copy of the actual record, I can never forget being in Oxford and, with white gloves on, touching and reading the actual will of an ancestor. Yes I've got a copy of it but to actually touch something, albeit with gloves on, that my ancestor wrote over three hundred years ago is wonderful. Without them I wouldn't be here and writing this.
Please, please, let me know of any amendments - I am human after all and do make mistakes!!!!
Dawn Rebecca C. |